The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont could become A Separate Peace for a new generation. But, in a coming of age story, what a difference 40 years make!
However similar in setting (New England prep schools) and themes (friendship, betrayal, guilt) they may be, The Starboard Sea isn’t likely to replace A Separate Peace as assigned reading, except in maybe the most progressive of schools – due to the adult activities of the late ’80s teenagers in this novel, who are more sophisticated and are growing up faster (at least, in some ways) than the prep school boys just before World War II in John Knowles’ classic novel. I don’t want to spoil the author’s careful construction of The Starboard Sea by giving away details of the narrative that are revealed over the course of the story, so I’m just going to speak very generally about the plot in this review.
Jason Prosper has washed up at a third-tier prep school on the Massachusetts coast for his senior year (Class of 1988) after the death of his roommate, best friend, and sailing partner at his last boarding school.
For years, I’d been happy to simply experience my life as an extension of Cal’s. Another limb that picked up the slack. While knowing him, I’d always searched for similarities. For anything that might make us interchangeable. Cal and I looked alike. Both of us had wild brown hair that turned woolly when our mothers forgot to have it cut. Our bodies were trim and athletic. We were sporty sailors, lean and lithe, not larded or buff. We walked with the same crooked swagger and low bent knees. Each of us had a cleft in our chin, a weakness in the muscle that we thought made us seem tough. But there were differences. Cal had broken my nose by accident and joked that my face was asymmetrical, that he had caused my good looks to be a millimeter off. I had to agree that he was the movie star and I was the movie star’s stunt double. My eyes were a dull slate gray, Cal’s were magnetic. His eyes were two different colors. One was green. Not hazel or tortoiseshell, but a rain forest green. The other varied from misty gray to violet: his mood eye. My face received comfortable, comforting glances, but people stared at Cal. He commanded an electric attention. The only other physical difference between us was obvious at the end of a summer’s day. Cal’s skin tanned olive brown, and mine turned red with blisters. Cal belonged on a postcard from the Mediterranean. I, on the other hand, would always be Prosper the Lobster. At least, that’s what he called me.
Jason doesn’t get a completely fresh start at Bellingham Academy – where, he explains, “If you could pay, you could stay” – because he’s trailed by rumors, and a couple of old acquaintances have landed there ahead of him. Known to be a gifted sailor, Jason is immediately recruited by the sailing coach, but sailing is a pleasure he can’t allow himself, until joining the team becomes a means to an end other than winning races. Jason restricts himself to explaining nautical terms and how to sail to Aidan, a boat-shy fellow student, a girl with no real friends at Bellingham, whom Jason’s jock buddies ostracize and taunt but Jason secretly befriends.
The tension in The Starboard Sea swells gradually, blending events from the present and the past so well that I never got the impatient (“Tell me the secret already!”) feeling that I sometimes get when the first-person narrator holds back something big. (In addition to A Separate Peace, The Starboard Sea is getting compared in blurbs to The Secret History by Donna Tartt, but I think The Starboard Sea is better.)
If you’re in the mood for atmospheric fiction; you don’t mind a book whose characters aren’t unambiguously good or bad; and the privileges of the wealthy won’t make you so outraged that you won’t want to read about them, I highly recommend The Starboard Sea. I hope the author has the draft of a second novel well underway.
Disclosure: I received an electronic advanced reading copy of this book from St. Martin’s Press through NetGalley.
The Starboard Sea
Dermont, Amber
St. Martin’s Press, February 2012
Hardcover
9780312642808
$24.99
Read Janet Maslin’s review of The Starboard Sea in The New York Times.
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“The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont could become A Separate Peace for a new generation.” –>great way to to sell a book to me in one sentence.
Thanks, Flannery. I hope no one else said it before me, but I know other reviewers have compared the book to A Separate Peace. It’s doing really well, and has been selected as an Indie Next pick for March on IndieBound. http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780312642808/amber-dermont/starboard-sea
I just read this too, so we can talk about it when I visit this weekend! I think they went a little nuts sending out advance review copies, because we got one at my office despite doing absolutely no fiction ever. It’s interesting to see how well it’s doing now; I wonder how much of the critical success is because of the really energetic advance promoting the publisher did rather than because of the merits of the book itself…like, the reviewer at the first paper who wrote it up would have seen all the glowing endorsements from the author’s MFA friends and thought, there must be something, and then other people noticed that someone else had written it up so they dug out their advance copies and wrote it up too, and then it snowballed. But maybe I’m just waxing cynical because I didn’t love the book. Blinded by my outrage at those wealthy prep school kids, maybe!
I try not to read reviews or blurbs before reading a book, but they are hard to avoid. Prep school books, in general, appeal to me, I guess, but I did think this one was really good. Maybe you’d like Old School by Thomas Wolff better; the main character is a scholarship boy!